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Mircea Eliade: Time, Death, and the Unspeakable Secret

Translated from Romanian by Mac Linscott Ricketts, Edited by Bryan Rennie

Istros Books

The Romanian writer Mircea Eliade (1907-1986) is best known in the English-speaking world as an influential Historian of Religion, author of such works as The Sacred and the Profane and The Myth of the Eternal Return. However, Eliade’s body of work is much broader, and throughout his life he kept the world of fiction and mysticism very close to his heart. Starting at the age of fourteen, Eliade continuously produced works of fiction alongside his academic work.
This volume consists of six of his best short stories, taken from over a 30-year period, starting in 1959 with “A Fourteen-Year-Old Photograph” – the tale of a distance healing in which the patient claims miracle while the healer admits artifice – and including perhaps his most famous short story, the time-shifting “At the Gypsies,” and culminating with “In the Shadow of a Lily,” the last story Eliade is known to have written. Each of these stories is dense with allusions and interwoven with connections and references drawn from the imagination and vast knowledge of a great man. Who knows what secrets they may conceal? One thing is for sure – they will repay repeated close reading, but will also charm on the first encounter.

 

 

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Writing Short Stories (third edition) by Ailsa Cox

The third edition of Writing Short Stories has been revised and updated to provide a complete guide to the craft of writing short stories. It emphasizes the importance of voice as a foundation for work on characterization, imagery, dialogue and pace, as readers move from their first sketches to working on more complex narrative structures.

Ailsa Cox guides readers through key aspects of the craft, providing a variety of case studies of classic and contemporary core texts. The wide range of writers discussed includes Edgar Allan Poe, Katherine Mansfield, Angela Carter, Alice Munro, Ali Smith, Iphgenia Baal, Octavia E. Butler and William Gibson. The diversity and flexibility of the short story genre is highlighted throughout, along with the specific challenges the writer faces. The book considers a range of genres, such as fantasy, science fiction, horror, autobiography, romance, comedy and satire. The new edition also includes extra insights into getting published, including publishing a first collection, with an updated list of resources and trends in short story writing.

This inspiring guide is the ideal companion for those new to the genre or for anyone looking to improve their technique. Each chapter contains a series of engaging exercises to help readers develop their skills and build confidence in their writing. There are also bolded key terms, with an extensive glossary at the end of the book.

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Spotlight PhD/ECR Interview Series: Emma Kittle-Pey

1. Can you remember the first short story you ever read?

I remember thinking Kafka’s The Metamorphosis was ridiculous. Later I fell in love with short fiction and thought differently about Kafka’s work, considering story but also themes related to society, working life and family. Ideas or moments in reading often inspire my writing. For example, when they can’t rely on him Gregor’s family must become active, so they become active. In my book the single mother must do everything, so she learns to do everything.

2. What can people gain by reading more short stories?

When students join my creative writing classes, they often say they have difficulty finishing stories. Oral story-telling and reading short fiction means that you are thinking about stories as a whole. It’s a great way to learn about writing or the ideas you’re interested in. I’m currently reading and thinking about Kate Atkinson’s story The Void in her linked collection Normal Rules Don’t Apply and Katy Wimhurst’s An Orchid in My Belly Button.

3. You bring a researcher-author perspective to short fiction. How do your creative and academic writing relate to each other?

I wanted to write a new story for the mother sacrificed to the plot in the film Muriel’s Wedding. This negative treatment of middle-aged women is shown in the story Lentils and Lilies by Helen Simpson. I explored Bakhtin’s dialogism, invitational rhetoric and polyvocality, contemporary novel composition and short story cycles which value and include the older mother’s perspective e.g. Girl, Woman, Other or The Wren, The Wren. This influenced the structure of my novel.

Dr Emma Kittle-Pey has recently completed her PhD in Creative Writing at the University of Essex. Her thesis is a creative/critical exploration of place and gender in contemporary fiction. The novel is a (grand)mother-daughter relationship set in coastal Essex. The reflective commentary focuses on place, specifically local coastal communities, the evolution of the mother-daughter plot, working women and women who write, writing short fiction and using short stories in longer form fiction.

Emma has had two collections published by Patrician Press and has read her short fiction nationally and internationally. She teaches at the University of Essex, ACL Essex, at a primary school, and works on projects for Essex Book Festival. She is the founder and curator of Colchester WriteNight, a popular monthly community writing event.

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The ENSFR Reading Group

The ENSFR reading group aims to provide a digital space for early-career researchers and postgraduate students to come together and informally discuss classic and contemporary short fiction. The reading group is co-coordinated by Paul Knowles (University of Manchester), Ines Gstrein (University of Innsbruck) and Maddie Sinclair (University of Warwick).

The group usually meets once per month during term time on Zoom. The link to the meeting room is circulated in advance via a mailing list, together with the set reading for the next meeting. For each meeting, there is a short story to read. There are also some questions to guide our reading and get the discussion started.

New members are always welcome! To sign up for the reading group, please send an email to the contact email address of the reading group: ensfrreadinggroup[at]gmail.com

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Call For Submissions – Creative Journal Anteena

Antenna: Journal of Arts, Humanities and Health welcomes words and images attentive to life, in its fullness and its fragility. For it is mainly in moments of heightened awareness of our vulnerability, and of the vulnerability of the world we inhabit, that life invites us to slow down, listen, look, feel, and try to find shareable words, images, and gestures. This happens both in the exhilaration of fellowship and in the experience of loss, illness, and grief. We know how difficult it is to articulate pain, grief or love. We know that there are experiences that challenge representation, be it verbal or non-verbal. Yet it is precisely because of how disruptive such experiences are that we are compelled to find ways to intimate the inchoate, to articulate the inarticulate, so as to make this knowable and shareable. For, as Clarice Lispector noted (2010), often it is by writing that we become aware of things that we didn’t even know we knew.

Within the context of the Project in Medical Humanities, based at the School of Arts and Humanities, University of Lisbon, we have applied the methodology proposed by Narrative Medicine (Charon 2008 & Charon et al. 2016) in teaching, as well as in reading and writing groups for patients, students, and healthcare providers. In this praxis, we explore the potential of close reading and reflective writing to learn more about ourselves and others. Antenna welcomes these and other reflective expressions, for, as Arthur W. Frank (2022) reminds us, “to know my own story, I need to encounter stories that are not mine.” Likewise, it is through our own experience that we engage with the stories of others. If academic writing frames ongoing analytical thinking and scientific knowledge, creative expression enables us to explore other forms of integrating experiential and reflective knowledge. By re-connecting biology, biography, and culture, by inscribing the subjective in the communal, literary and artistic expression invites us to consider the multifaceted experience of health and illness, in the fullness and vulnerability of being alive. Antenna aims to air such expressions so that they may be audible and find resonance both among those receiving and providing healthcare, as well as in academic reflection, political decision-making, and civic engagement.

Antenna: Journal of Arts, Humanities and Health accepts texts, images, and videos in the following categories: poetry; fiction; literary non-fiction; graphic narrative; visual arts; video; reviews. The working languages are English and Portuguese

Submission Guidelines
Poetry: up to 3 poems
Fiction and literary non-fiction: 2000-3000 words
Flash fiction: up to 1000 words
Graphic narrative: up to 3 pages (high resolution)
Visual arts: up to 3 images (high resolution, at least 2000 pix)
Video (cinema, documentary, dance, music, theatre): up to 5 minutes
Reviews (of publications, films, documentaries, performances, exhibitions): up to 1000 words

Contact: antenna@letras.ulisboa.pt
Publication: annual

CFP Antenna 1/2025:
– Submissions: 30 June 2025
– Publication: Autumn 2025